The Importance of Bad Fish: Day One in Madrid
Trip Start
Aug 17, 2008
1
3
9
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Madrid,
Spain
Monday, August 18, 2008
We arrived in Madrid on Monday, each straggling in from the four corners of the earth. We weren't sure if the group of participants from Kiev was going to make it to Madrid, after the Spanish embassy in Kiev confiscated their passports-a "flight threat" they said. Mind you, our Kiev group is a bunch of over- educated 20- something Jewish professionals, but EU countries have, apparently, become less generous in dispensing visas to people from the former Soviet Union. A few days before the tour began, and after the entire board of the sponsoring organization began a mass letter writing campaign to the embassy, Spain changed its mind and gave them visas. (And because our tour goes to Spain, Gibraltar, and Morocco, the Kiev participants needed not one, not two, but three visas, while the American citizens needed none. Talk about the importance of citizenship and belonging.)
Our Madrid tour guide tried her best to keep a jet-lagged group of Jewish tourists interested in the history of Madrid - a history that has almost nothing to say about Jews. Madrid was made the capital of Spain in the 16th century, almost 100 years after Jews were expelled from the country by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.
Isabella Reading "Cervantes"
In fact, Madrid's Jewish history is really a 20th century history, making it an odd beginning to a tour that will be focused on the rich medieval history of Sefardic Jewry.(PS - I feel it imperative to mention that I am writing this on the long bus ride between Toledo and Cordoba as our group belts out "Od Yavo Shalom Aleynu" (a popular Hebrew song in American synagogues and at Jewish camps worldwide, not least because of the refrain that switches out the Hebrew "shalom" for the Arabic "salaam") and an assortment of slightly schmaltzy Russian tunes. I have no idea what our Spanish bus driver is thinking at this moment.)
The problem with the tour guide was not the lack of Jewish content in Madrid history. It was the fact that she sanitized the version of history she told. Now mind you, I imagine that tour guides get into the business, because they are proud of their local and national history. But there was no mention of the Expulsion, Inquisition, and only cursory mention of more modern tough times in Spanish history, like the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. To those of you who know my writing, you know that I am far from one to revel in the lachrymose reading of Jewish history (they chased us, they killed us, we survived, let's eat). But not to explain why there's no Jewish history to Madrid seemed more than a simple oversight. My opening anecdote about Spain's Christian rulers spreading the "light" of Cervantes rather than Christ was just another example of storytelling that elided the violent Christian past of this beautiful country.
In the evening, a group of us sat in the garden and attempted to craft a more complicated history of Spain and also one that connected to the Russian Jews who were on the tour.
Zhenya and Davai
I told them the story of Mikhail Koltsov (nee Fridlyand), a good Jewish boy from Kiev, who became the most powerful journalist in Stalin's Soviet Union. He was sent to Spain in 1936 to cover the Spanish Civil War for the Soviet press and was purged in December 1937. Why? In general, there is no way of explaining why one person was purged and another spared during the bloody years of 1936-1938. Many great writers were purged in 1937, so Koltsov's story is just one of many. But the connection to Spain of this Russian Jew, the man who made he Spanish Civil War a huge media event in the Soviet Union, seemed relevant to the group. Dinner proved to be the most interesting part of the day, because of a visiting speaker and a fight over fish. When I was invited to design an engaging educational program for Russian Jews to Spain, I resisted. As a historian, I always try to see Jewish history in conversation with contemporary Jewish life and when designing Jewish travel I always encourage engagement with contemporary Jews in the places visited, even in places where the dominant Jewish story is one of persecution. (Remember that any place that has a Jewish history of persecution also had - or has - a history of vibrant Jewish life.) To that end, in Spain although we would talk about the Expulsion and Inquisition, we would spend most of our time reading medieval Jewish philosophy and studying Hebrew poetry. But how to connect to contemporary Jewish life? After a bit of research, I discovered that there is a small and growing Jewish community in Spain, estimated at 10,000-15,000 registered with the official community and 40,000-50,000 total Jews.
Boys on the Bus
And I found a government funded initiative called Casa Sefarad that promotes Sefardic Jewish culture throughout Spain. I invited one of their educators to come tell the group about Casa Sefarad to connect the past to the present.Casa Sefarad educator Yessica San Ramon, an avid hiker, who had just returned from a trip to Georgia (dodging Russians bombs) was delightful, informed, and passionate. Although not Jewish herself, she spends much time in Israel working with Yad Vashem on Holocaust education in Spain. She talked about Spanish-language Jewish radio, available streaming on the internet, the birth of state-sponsored Holocaust education in contemporary Spain, and about the fact that Sefardic Jewish culture is becoming more and more trendy throughout Spain.
The other interesting conversation happened over a piece of less than tasty fish that was served for dinner. One member of our group jokingly reminisced that the fish tasted like "that old crappy cafeteria fish back in Russia." Two parts mocking, one part nostalgia, the comment elicited a sharp defensive reaction from another member of the group. She was offended at the seeming class privilege the statement implied-now that we're American Russian Jews we don't have to eat such cheap nasty fish. She also argued that the comment about "cafeteria fish" missed the point that even if poorly prepared, fish for many Russians in the past and even now might be a privilege. It prompted me to think about young Russian Jewish immigrants' relationship to Russia and the Soviet Union, which like the original comment, is at once distanced mocking and intimate nostalgia. Unlike the first wave of Jewish immigrants from Russia to America at the turn of the last century who saw America as di goldene medine, tended to cut most ties with the homeland, and saw Russia primarily through the lens of anti-Semitism, the current wave has a more nuanced, complicated, and connected relationship with their Russian past. That said, based on my initial conversations, although they all speak Russian, feel nostalgically about Russian culture, sing Russian songs on the bus, and see themselves as culturaly Russian, very few of them has ever been back to Russia.
Once the tension over fish passed, the group retired to the garden for beer and conversation, nearly all speaking to one another in Russian, as I passed out under the happy influence of jet lag, exhaustion from teaching...and half an ambien.
